The girl who was taking us to the opera asked where we intended to have dinner and we told her we would be going for the third time in a row to the Golden Tripod Attic<\/i>. There was some sneer in her voice when she said \u201cBut that\u2019s a normal place!\u201d And she was right: the Golden Tripod Attic is a \u201cnormal\u201d Beijing place, nothing like the fancy schmantzy Qianmen Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant<\/i> where we had some fun eating the all-duck set menu \u2013 despite the European couple at the neighboring table keeping a permanently lit cigarette close at hand to puff from between every other mouthful.<\/p>\n
Yes, the Golden Tripod Attic<\/i> is a perfectly normal place where normal Beijing people come for a mildly-priced excellent meal (we paid $25 to $30 for a feast of a meal for the two of us).<\/p>\n
We had had our count of the lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork and hot and sour soup that our travel agency imagined was as much as we could take \u2013 we were even offered (decent, I need to add) French fries at the Friendship Restaurant<\/i> on our way to the Great Wall, but it was an utmost relief to find something different, like beef tripe, goose intestine or kidney, that we\u2019ve learned to get so much starved of in the US.
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\nWe ate there last night, today for lunch and tonight for dinner again. When yesterday night we first glimpsed at the restaurant\u2019s gloriously neon-lit fa\u00e7ade, we baptized it the \u201cFood Palace\u201d and that\u2019s the way it will remain in our minds, despite the intriguing poetry of its actual name: the \u201cGolden Tripod Attic.\u201d <\/p>\n